Trump's Demonizing of Immigrants is Only the First Step on a Road That Could Lead to Dictatorship (and Nuclear War). Roger Algase

Update: August 12, 1:03 pm:
The Hill reports on August 12 that a Charlottesville, Virginia Newspaper has used the same phrase "fire and fury" that Donald Trump used to threaten North Korea with retaliation in describing a white nationalist rally which took place in that state.

Obviously, Trump did not write that headline and is not responsible for anything which that newspaper says.

But it is not entirely a surprise that the same president who used the above phrase in a patently irresponsible and absurd attempt to intimidate North Korea (while at the same time risking nuclear war and the extinction of life on this planet) has also distinguished himself for making hostile comments about minority immigrants (whom he called "animals" in his recent Brentwood, New York speech) throughout his campaign and presidency.

This is in the same venomous spirit of hatred and prejudice that the white nationalists (many of whom are also Trump supporters) have also been showing at their rallies toward all people of color.

My original comment follows:

Much of the commentary on Trump's immigration speeches and actions, both as candidate and president, has tended to look at each element of his policies in isolation. The implied assumption has, all too often, been that none of the issues raised by Trump's approach to immigration has had any relation to the rest of his immigration policies, let alone to his broader agenda of cutting back on or eliminating the basic rights that the American people are used to taking for granted, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote and separation of powers with an independent judiciary.

There has been even less discussion of how any given detail of immigration policy could affect even broader issues involving America's place in the world, our relations with other countries, or the survival of the human race itself. Instead, each piece of Trump's immigration agenda has been looked at as if it were part of a larger jigsaw puzzle, but a puzzle in which there were no other pieces except the one at hand; or, or there were any other pieces, none of them had any significance.

To give only the most recent example, Trump's support for the RAISE Act, which would make one of the biggest changes in our entire immigration history by making drastic cuts in immigration from non-white areas of the world and take this country a very long way on the road leading back toward the infamous "Nordics"-only Immigration Act of 1924 (which Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he had drawn inspiration from because of the law's racial assumptions), is being trivialized in much of today's discussion as only a theoretical debate over whether an immigration point system is better than one based on invitation.

This tendency toward isolation, "slicing and dicing" each piece of the immigration picture and focusing on that issue exclusively has been apparent in many other areas of the discussion:

Are grandparents of US citizens close enough relatives so as to be exempt from Trump's ban on immigrants from six almost 100 per cent Muslim countries?

How long does an immigrant have to have been in the United States for, or how far from the border does he or she have to be apprehended, before losing the right to a due process deportation hearing and being subjected to expedited removal?

Should a Wall with Mexico be a real for a virtual one, or a combination of both, and where should the funding come from?

In determining the real intent and purpose of Trump's Muslim ban orders, how far back in time (if at all) should the federal courts go in looking at his various statements and actions showing what the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals recently referred to as the president's "animus" against Muslims and the Muslim religion in an overwhelming 10-3 en banc decision which is now under review by the Supreme Court?

Even more absurdly, as I have mentioned in a recent comment, is it acceptable in a free and democratic society to arrest immigrants seeking justice, or at least self-protection by reporting crimes, inside a courthouse (as long as the arrest doesn't take place in the courtroom itself!), or should the arrests take place only outside the court house door - or across the street?

At the risk that some readers may find the following comment offensive (though it is not intended to compare Trump in any way with Hitler's anti-semitism or genocide, neither of which Trump has ever shown the slightest scintilla of sympathy or support for), arguing over issues such as these is at least faintly reminiscent of the debate in 1930's Germany over how many Jewish grandparents would define someone as a Jew under the notorious Nuremberg Laws.

Admittedly, many people, immigration lawyers and policy analysts included, are very fond of arguing over trivia and minute detail instead of focusing on the larger picture. But in view of Donald Trump's latest wild threats to launch a first strike on another unpredictable and irresponsible leader, North Korea's Kim Jong Un (see the following link for the latest, as of this writing)

something that could lead to a nuclear holocaust and the extinction of humanity, it is no longer possible to avoid looking at the larger implications of Trump's autocratic, bellicose policies against immigrants from non-white areas of the world.

As two respected analysts, Colin Kahl and Hal Brands, wrote in Foreign Policy some six months ago, on January 31, Trump's obsession with the alleged dangers presented by non-white immigrants, needs to be looked at a part of a grand strategy, a world view, (Weltanschauung, if you will) that may have catastrophic consequences for America and the entire world.

2) Trade competition from China (which Trump also blames for "failing" to contain North Korea);

and, arguably the one he has tried to exploit most of all, in as many ways as he can:

3) Illegal Immigration (by which Trump obviously means all immigration, including legal immigration from non-white areas of the world, as shown in his support for the RAISE act).

How Trump is using all of these perceived threats, and especially the alleged threat of immigration from non-white parts of the world such as Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia, in order to amass as much uncontrolled power for himself as possible and divert public attention away from his own legal problems, chiefly relating to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's alleged Russia ties, even if this risks a possible nuclear war with North Korea and the extinction of the entire human race, will be discussed further in my next, forthcoming, comment on the above Foreign Policy article.
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Roger Algase is a New York immigration lawyer and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. For more than 35 years, Roger has been helping mainly skilled and professional immigrants from diverse parts of the world obtain work visas and green cards.